MrFoof

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Based on what's still around, likely the one (now rebranded a Star Market, same holding company) in Porter Square, right by Porter Square station.

Based on what I recall, I believe there was one on the southeastern end of Green Street, a bit between Central and Kendall Square, barely northwest of MIT's primary campus area on the corner Massachusetts Ave and Vassar Street. That location has apparently closed in recent years.

Possible outcome: Gray goo scenario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo)

A recent "popular culture" reference to the scenario mentioned in the article is the video game, "Horizon: Zero Dawn."

Agreed. For anyone thinking the above comment might be mean spirited, here's why it's not:

* In 2017, there were ~1,108,400 US high school football players.

* In 2017, there were ~67,800 US college football players.

* In 2017, 255 players were drafted into the NFL.

So from high school to playing in the NFL, odds of 0.023%, or about 1:4346.

Even then, the average tenure of a professional NFL player is 39 months.

--

Football is one of the easier sports to go pro in as well.

Not California, but recently I had "SIXSPD" denied by a state after putting the first known 6-speed manual (all were sold as dual-clutch automatics) in an enthusiast car.

I was told that abbreviations weren't allowed. That was the denial reason.

Resubmitted it, not denied yet. We'll see if it shows up in another 3-5 weeks or if I get a denial letter followed by an another application refund 4-6 weeks after that.

I was past edit window.

I got that wrong.

“You know what they call the Hunger Games in France? Battle Royale with Cheese.”

Too many things going on, typed it in backwards!

Big money! Big prizes! … IIIII LOVE IT!

You know what they call Battle Royale in France?

Hunger Games with Cheese.

I saw Battle Royale as a subbed bootleg around 20 years ago. Fantastic B-movie, and I understand some of the young actors got some notable roles as they got older (Takeshi Kitano was there because he was Takeshi Kitano), but it’s still a B-movie. Good time though, even today.

As an aside on Takeshi, for those who want to go down a rabbit hole, dig into “Takeshi’s Challenge” on the Nintendo Famicom. That game is a trip.

mspt was consistently ~20msec. It’s why the rubber banding surprised me: everything was great until it wasn’t.

Realm of the Mad God will make your game seem “comfy speed” by comparison. You’ve not yet seen fast. ;)

Simple and fun.

In my very first game I got to Rank 6 with 24K points. However, there's some cases where the client and server get out of sync (despite only supposed 10-20ms latency) where the server eventually syncs you with some wild rubber banding. I died because during this rubber banding where I was shoved across the map, I likely was picked off by the leader with 118K points.

Take care of the latency issues and you have the core of something. Something similar-but-different is "Realm of the Mad God" which originally was a Ludum Dare entry using the Oryx spritesheet. So add in some interesting NPCs, and deal with the latency issues and you have the core of something that actually is monetizable.

Yes, Boston is considered the educational capital of the planet.

Boston itself is about 700,000 people, but if you extend things to a 20 mile radius from Boston (say from DTX), in that area there is a transient student population of 400,000 people that are only there to attend higher education and ultimately call elsewhere home. Within 20 miles of Boston are several dozen (nearly 60?) universities, making education one of its six or seven tent-pole industries.

Potentially it's items that move very very low volume but provide significant value by being available?

That doesn't matter, and exactly why corporate brought it up. Again, opportunity cost.

I asked my nearest 7-Eleven manager (I never go to convenience stores, so I just went in to the closest one) about how many customers he gets a month, and he said about 8,000. How many SKUs? About 2500. So for 40% of his SKUs, of the 8000 customers that walk in, 1 of 8000 is willing to buy a specific one of those 1000 items (at that elevated price) from that store. That's 1000 SKUs that could be at least partially replaced with something with far better sell-through. Shelf space isn't free. Backroom space isn't free. That's dedicated square footage, he's paying a lease on every single month, forever, for stuff that doesn't move.

The guy isn't running a convenience store out of the goodness of his heart. There's a supermarket 3 blocks away selling the same items for far less money, so it's not like he's selling something you can't get just a 3-minute further walk (or 1-minute drive) away.

I asked him about slow selling items. "Oh, you saw the video too?!" He was fully onboard with corporate support to not just get much better sell-through (and ergo, revenue), but having a reason for more people to come into the store, especially on a regular basis, and not simply getting things because, "they happen to already be here."

This location in particular WASN'T with a service station out front (inner city location). So for the manager, a way to get more regular customers, that are coming in to buy things they want -- possibly if they can't get it as easily (or at all) nearby -- is a HUGE potential win for him. That might help him get hundreds more customers every month, which might buy other things as well.

What was more surprising to me is the realization by corporate that 40% of the in-store SKUs in their US stores (in a given location) only sold through 1 or fewer units per month. That means if a franchise store got shipped a box of 12 units of a SKU, it might take a year or more to sell that box through.

What kills me is they're possibly just realizing this in 2024. What on earth has the corporate analytics team been doing all this time to not make that sort of opportunity cost screamingly obvious? Even if the margin is good, you're moving no volume.

I realize that it's probably cleaning products and other shelf stable items, but that just blew my mind.

It appears that today Coffeezilla has put his first investigative video out on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBUkajbg688

30+ year old established case precedent disagrees with you:

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/communications...

https://casetext.com/case/waits-v-frito-lay-inc

Would love to see a postmortem once it's dealt with.

Not where I am.

At my local Home Depot, all the staffed registers are long unavailable, with the exception of one in the "pro" section. There are self-checkout registers... but they're all manned by Home Depot Employees. Not to watch over you, but running them in an admin mode, and using them as normal registers. It is absolutely ridiculous.

I believe the reason may be related to theft. All of the entrances no longer open except one. Well, at least for entering the store, as you can still exit through any of the doors just fine.

If this seems bad, here's how bad it is: Last time I went to Home Depot to get one or two things because they had it and I wanted them now, there were two older women in line in front of me. Aged 60+. They were discussing how ridiculous the situation was. One even said, "I realize they've probably done this because of theft, but this is so stupid now that honestly, I almost feel as if I should steal from the store to stick it to them!"

When old ladies feel that stealing from your store is justifiable, you've done messed up.

This is like learning that there actually 1000 tiny elves inside of your television drawing the pictures.

This a real-life, genuine Flintstones-esque cartoon gag.

I agree the math is a bit off, so let's look at the percentages.

The current Toyota Corolla, in 3-box sedan form, starts at 119,800 RMB in China. The BYD Qin is also a 3-box sedan, similar dimensions, but starts at 109,800 RMB, or 8.4% cheaper.

To compare this directly to the US, a 2024 Corolla starts at $22,050. So this would be like launching the Qin in the US at $19,995. If you did the same percentages it'd be $20,210, but "$19,995" gets you the "Under $20,000" which would be extremely noteworthy in the US where there's not much left under $20K. They'd probably be willing to eat $215/unit of margin at launch just to be able to run with "Starting at under $20K" in advertisements until the sales really roll in, then raise the price a bit 2 years later to get the margin they wanted.

The most expensive ($8.09) in Lee, MA is in a highway rest stop plaza about 110 miles west of Boston near the state’s western border (just outside the Berkshires) that is well known for its crazy prices. You buy anything in that plaza and you’re getting taken for a ride.

For comparison, Boston (and immediate surroundings) Big Mac prices are $5.89 - $6.79 depending on the location, and that includes one of the city’s largest train and subway stations/bus terminals, in some extremely expensive to rent real estate within the financial district because of how many potential customers go through it every day.

"UniversalHub" is a play on the old shtick that Boston is the "Hub of the Universe."

As a Bostonian, it's a reasonably well known local news blog run primarily by one individual (Adam Gaffin) that yes, does report on actual news. I sent him info about a robbery (with video stills) at an apartment complex I lived at, and he covered in, in which both FOX 25 and I think NBC Boston ultimately then used him as a source (and were referred to me by Adam for further info).

So super-Boston metro specific, very niche, and very tiny, but I've been aware of it for at least 15 years.

Ubiquiti's U7-Pro has not only already launched, but mine was delivered a few hours ago. There's already reviews up (including YouTube) as well.

If you want MU-MIMO (so 4x4 or more), I'd expect the U7-Enterprise later this year.

I'd give it a few months.

Both laptops (sans Apple) and desktop PCs (even USFFs) tend to use the NGFF M2.2230 form factor cards, typically with two antenna connectors.

Yes, even your super fancy high-end desktop PC motherboard ultimately has an NGFF M2.2230 WiFi and BlueTooth combo card plugged in somewhere. It might be ultimately buried under a large VRM or other heatsink, but it's there nonetheless. Granted, replacing these sometimes necessitates entirely removing the motherboard from the case.

Note for desktop PCs that you'll likely hook up an actual antennas to the RP-SMA connectors on the rear IO panel. Especially so if you're looking to take advantage of 6GHz spectrum. These antennas are a far less popular include with motherboards (even high end ones) than years ago, but they're generally only about $15-20 to purchase if you need better signal and range.

My point wasn't that Twitch should be given the money for no reason, but that Twitch is foolish for not finding ways to be the platform in which people want to pay the money through, instead of the third-party platforms.

Donations is a great example. Look at how much large streamers get from third-party donation sites, versus what streamers get from subscriptions and bits. It is wildly unbalanced in favor of third-party sites. That's on Twitch, for failing to figure out how to better incentivize viewers to pay via Twitch, as opposed to those viewers going to a third-party platform to pay instead.

That's my real point. Twitch has monetization options, but they pale in comparison to third parties, ergo that's where a lot of a streamer's (not talking just softcore streamers, but in general) revenue comes from -- third parties, and not Twitch. Twitch desperately needs to figure out how to provide more competitive and appealing options to both viewers and its platform streamers, lest it continue to lose out on revenue by simply being a vastly inferior option to everywhere else.

I honestly wonder how the softcore content works out in terms of impacting Twitch's balance sheet.

I'm not interested in it, but I'm not against it. Yet I genuinely question how it works in Twitch's favor in any material way.

Basically, I look at the softcore streams as those streamers using Twitch as a platform to provide additional content for no meaningful capital cost to the themselves (the streamers, not Twitch). It's basically a free additional discovery and advertising channel to attract new users to their core monetization platform (like OnlyFans) where they make their actual money. Twitch is basically giving them a free platform to direct most of the money to another platform, not to Twitch.

So where is Twitch making real money in that? If you're telling me through subs and bits, you're out of your mind, because that's peanuts compared to what those gals are getting from their OnlyFans, merch, other donation platforms, etc. They're snatching up nickels while the comparative money firehose is pointed elsewhere, all while diluting their brand at least a bit. Granted, I feel they need to expand their audience regardless out of the video game niche, but I question if this has been materially moving the needle.

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Don't even get me started on the other core issues. The abhorrent recommendations and difficulty of discovery, the inadequate monetization options for streamers, the limited number of advertisers and where I only get recommended product categories (like energy drinks) I have never bought in my existence, etc.

There are reasons for folks to wait for the PRO.

* First are the EPYC memory protection features. No other Ryzen SKU has them. I actually care about these protection and isolation features.

* Second are the GE variants. Think similar to Intel’s T and TE variants. These are super binned for extra low power consumption. An 8750GE will be binned to actually be at max performance at a 35W TDP. Yes, you could set a G to Eco Mode or whatever, but I’ve done those experiments with 5700Gs and 5700Xs, and the performance nor power consumption is not quite there compared to the GE versions.

* Last is AMD DASH support. Think Intel vPro IPMI without needing a dedicated BMC (just an onboard NIC that supports DASH). Non-PRO Ryzen SKUs do not support DASH.

I won’t be waiting regardless as my 5750GEs are good for many more years still, but the PRO variants genuinely have real differentiating features.

As someone with four Ryzen 7 PRO 5750GEs, I’ll say I’m looking forward to whenever the Ryzen 7 PRO 8750GEs exist. :)

In raw CPU performance, I found the 5750GE was 90-92% of the CPU performance of a 5700X, but capped out at a total package power of just 39W. 5750GEs made for fantastic home server CPUs, so here’s hoping there’ll be an 8750GE later this year (plus some ASRock Rack mATX motherboards with ECC support and BMCs).

I agree the OEM only was a pain. I had to get my 5750GEs through mostly disassemblers/recyclers, though some boutique shops like QuietPC buy a half tray of them at a time to sell directly to end users, so keep on the lookout!

Tom Scott was so sharp, he knew to end on a high note, and damn near his peak.

It’s one thing to produce a lot of great content, but it’s very rare for someone to wrap it up when they clearly were still at or near their best.

Agreed! Despite being PCIe 3.0, these were perfect home server CPUs because of the integrated GPU and ECC support. The idles were a bit higher than 12th gen Intels (especially the similarly tough to find "T" and especially "TE" processors) mostly because of X570s comparatively higher power draw, but if you ran DDR5 on the Intel platform it was kind of a wash, and under load the Zen 3 PRO GEs won by a real margin. Plus you really could use every scrap of bandwidth and compute these chips could muster. You use ALL the chip. :)

My HP ProDesk 405 G8 Minis with a 2.5GbE NIC (plus the built in 1GbE which supported AMD DASH IPMI) idled at around 8.5W, and with the 10GbE NICs that came out around June, are more around 9.5W -- with a 5750GE, 64GB of DDR4-3200 (non-ECC), WiFi 6E and BT 5.3, a 2TiB SK Hynix P31 Gold (lowest idle of any modern M.2 NVMe?), and modern ports including 10Gb USB-C. Without the WiFi/BT card it might actually get down to 9W.

The hilarious thing about those is they have an onboard SATA connector, but also another proprietary FlexIO connector that can take an NVIDIA GTX 1660 6GB! You want to talk a unicorn, try finding those GPUs in the wild! I've never seen one for sale separately! If you get the EliteDesk (over the ProDesk) you also get a 2nd M2.2280 socket for mirroring.

I have three of those beefy ProDesk 805 G8 Minis in a Proxmox 8 cluster, and it mostly runs Apache Spark jobs, sometimes with my PC participating (how I know the storage server can sustain 55GbE data transfer!), and it's hilarious that you have this computerized stack of napkins making no noise that's fully processing (reading, transforming, and then writing) 3.4GiB/sec of data -- closer to 6.3GiB/sec if my 5950X PC is also participating. I don't need the cloud, we have cloud at home!

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If you want a 5750GE, check eBay. That's where you'll find them, and rarely NewEgg. Just don't get Lenovo systems unless you want the whole thing, because the CPUs are PSB fuse-locked to the system they came in.

4750GEs are Zen 2s and cheaper (half the price), and pretty solid, but I think four fewer PCIe lanes. Nothing "wrong" with a 5750G per se, but they cap more around 67-68W instead of 39W.

Just if you see a 5750GE, grab it ASAP. People like me hunt those things like the unicorns they are. They go FAST! Some sellers will put up 20 at a time, and they'll all be gone within 48 hours.

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I really look forward to the Zen 4 versions of these chips, and the eventual possibility of putting 128GiB of memory into a 1L form factor, or 256GiB into a low power storage server. I won't need them (I'm good for a looooong time), but it's nice to know it'll be a thing.

Intel 15th gen may be great too, as it's such a massive architecture shift plus a new process node. Intel also tends to have really low board chipset power consumption, and really low idles.

Obscenely capable home servers that make no noise and idle in the 7-10W range are utterly fantastic.